This film, the original version of Tom Cruise's Vanilla Sky,
is a stylish, ambitious thriller that may not quite achieve the profundity
it's aiming for but nonetheless plays fascinating tricks with reality and
imagination, dreams and waking, and the degree to which we can trust what
we perceive, even about ourselves. Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) is a handsome
but dissipated rich boy, notorious for never spending two nights with the
same woman. But on the evening of a party in his apartment he discovers
that his latest conquest, Nuria, has no intention of being discarded like
all the rest.

That night he falls in love, or in lust at any rate, with his best friend's
date, Sofia (Penélope Cruz) and when the friend gets drunk, Cesar
takes Sofia home and spends the night, though just talking. Next
morning, as he's leaving, he finds Nuria waiting for him and is taunted
into accepting a ride home. On the way she swerves off the road,
a murder/suicide attempt that kills her and leaves Cesar horribly disfigured.
Much of the remainder of the story is told in flashbacks, with Cesar in
the psychiatric ward of a prison--wearing a mask that looks somewhat like
his original face, but inhuman and immobile--trying to piece together what
has happened since, including the events that have ended with him being
held for the murder of Sofia, with whom he eventually became lovers, though
obviously ill-fated.

As Cesar and an immensely patient psychiatrist delve back into the past,
various elements like cryogenics, reconstructive surgery, a charismatic
TV personality, the mysterious reappearance of Nuria, and a possible scheme
by a group of investors with whom Cesar shares business interests all enter
into the tangled plot. Some of this is confusing and the behavior
of several characters, especially Sofia, is unbelievable as its happening,
but by the end these inconsistencies have been cleared up, if not the entirety
of the plot, which is left fairly open-ended.

Though the tale is quite convoluted it's never needlessly so.
The whole is done with great vigor and a sure-handedness that carries the
film through its most dubious moments. The only real problem is structural
: Cesar is such a flaming anus that the viewer quite enjoys seeing him
get his comeuppance, rather than feeling much empathy. This makes
for a somewhat sadistic, but still enjoyable, experience as he's taught
some brutal lessons about the limits of wealth and physical beauty.
One might prefer an ending that made a more definitive statement about
what's come before, but the intentional ambiguity allows for personal conjecture.
That may be a bit maddening but its not necessarily a bad thing.